4/29/2007

I was totally right. I saw one of those minature personalized license plates yesterday and bought it. It was pretty excited. I never see “Adrian.” My roommate said that “Adrian” had to be in the top 50 most popular names. How to resolve this? The Social Security Administration to the rescue!

Their site will show you top 20, 50, 100, 500, and 1000 names for any year back to 1880 (1880’s most popular names? John for boys, Mary for girls). In the year I was born, 1980, Adrian was the 115th most popular male name with 2,387 total Adrians that year.

The top 10 names from that year:

Michael

Christopher

Jason

David

James

Matthew

Joshua

John

Robert

Joseph

You can also check out the fads, how a particular name changed in popularity over a period of time.

After the jump how “Adrian” has varied since my birth year.

Year and rank of “Adrian” as a boys name for births that year. Looks like it’s only gotten more popular. I’ve always been a trendsetter…

If you really want to have some fun with baby naming, check out this applet that uses the social security data. It’s interactive. You can run the mouse down the left side of the years and see all of the old names that were popular in 1880.